Titus Andronicus
A Film Adaptation by Julie Taymor
The National Post

Director Julie Taymor makes the play contemporary by staying faithful to the script

Just for identification purposes: Titus Andronicus is the Shakespeare play in which two men rape the protagonist's daughter, afterwards depriving her of her hands and her tongue to stop her telling tales It is also the play in which the father, who has found out anyway, avenges her and himself by cutting the assailants' throats, grinding their bones to powder and serving them up to their mother as filling in a pie. It has been strikingly filmed by Julie Taymor who has performed her own amputation on the title, reducing it to Titus. It is also on the bill for this year's Stratford Festival, which could create some confusion. People may come expecting a sequel -- the further adventures of Titus, in the company of some guy named Dronicus.

The attendant publicity has included some pretty wild statements. The play has been widely described as Shakespeare's first, which we certainly don't know; it was undoubtedly his first tragedy but there are no firm grounds for dating it earlier than The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Comedy of Errors or the Henry VI trilogy. Frankly, there is no extant Shakespeare play that feels like anybody's first; they are all too ambitious or too accomplished or both. It is also being routinely described as his worst, as if that too were an agreed fact. Actually that caravan has moved on; these days it's likelier to be that slight comedy The Two Gentlemen that gets the booby prize. Scholars have discovered all kinds of virtues in Titus over the last 50 years; and the theatre has, if anything, been ahead of them.

The stage history of Titus is manageably brief. A hit with the Elizabethans (or rather, a phenomenon: Ben Jonson, the cutting-edge playwright of the next generation, was cheerfully sneering at its popularity some 30 years later), it was abandoned by later generations as an unstageable catalogue of horrors. It didn't come into its own until 1955, when Peter Brook, at the English Stratford, directed, designed and composed the music for a production so menacingly atmospheric that people were fainting even before the first knife came out.

Kenneth Tynan, who thought Laurence Olivier's Titus established him as "pound for pound, the greatest actor alive," brilliantly described the play as crude but essential tragedy, "the piling of agony on to a human head until it splits." He also borrowed from Wilde's Lady Bracknell to describe its atmosphere of casual slaughter: "To lose one son may be accounted a misfortune; to lose 24, as Titus does, looks like carelessness." Most of these losses have taken place in war, before the play starts. Titus is a successful Roman general who seems more than willing to pay the price for victory.

Brook and Olivier were obviously a hard act to follow, but they opened the floodgates. The Royal Shakespeare Company has done the play three times since, the last (1987) in a spartan production by Deborah Warner that many, including me, would rank as the most completely realized Shakespeare of the last 20 years.

This year's production will be the Canadian Stratford's third; I've seen more Tituses there than I have Hamlets, Lears or Othellos. I have favourable memories of Brian Bedford's production, with William Hutt, and no memory at all of the second version, directed by Jeanette Lambermont.

It's noticeable, though, that the play has proved a favourite with women directors. Jane Howell directed it for the BBC's Shakespeare series and the Julie Taymor film follows on her stage version in New York.

Taymor has described Titus in an interview as "the play of the millennium"; it's reassuring to discover that she means, not the best play of the last thousand years but the play that best reflects the violence that has characterized it. Other things have characterized it too, of course, but yes, it has been appallingly violent. So, as far as we can tell, have earlier millennia, notably the one that Titus is set in. The temptation is to gloat over it; to take a grisly play, and exult in your own power to rub audiences' faces in it, usually on the pretext that it's good for them.

Taymor has also claimed -- in an interview in this paper -- that Titus isn't actually all that violent, no more so than Richard III. (Maybe it's a close call, but 14 characters are killed in Titus, 11 in Richard, all but two of them offstage and with no mutilations, at least none we get to hear about.)

She has also pushed the line that everyone but her has dismissed the play, and she has had especially hard words for Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human), who thinks the play is a joke. I think that Bloom is wrong, but he isn't stupidly wrong, and it's certainly untrue that he has no sense of theatre; his tastes may be a little old-fashioned, but that's no crime. All this, of course, is the kind of thing that directors always say; and if Taymor had just made a film of Macbeth, she would be proclaiming that that was the greatest, too.

One may harbour legitimate suspicions of a director who chooses this source for her first feature film. But the results lift her clean off the hook. This may be the best Shakespeare picture ever made.

One thing that nobody seems to have noticed is that it is very true to its text; it probably includes a greater proportion than any previous Shakespeare film (with the special-case exception of Kenneth Branagh's full- length Hamlet). This is especially notable because many speeches in Titus are stiff and rhetorical, the kind of thing you don't expect a modern audience to sit still for. They require a lot of breath, and Jessica Lange -- who plays Titus' arch- enemy Tamora, Queen of the Goths -- unfortunately doesn't have it. But Anthony Hopkins as Titus does; and I doubt that Taymor could have made the film without him. What counts is not that he's played Hannibal Lecter, but that he's played Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Othello, though none of those performances were as good as this. His conception, I would guess, is a somewhat cozier version of Olivier's: a world-weary, weather-beaten soldier deaf to any code but the military one. When Tamora pleads with him for the life of her eldest son, marked as a victory sacrifice, he seems genuinely puzzled; war is war, and religion is religion, and surely she knows the rules. An outlook as rigid as this can crack horribly, and when Tamora, unexpectedly raised to Empress of Rome, begins to take her revenge, Titus' sanity collapses; even words begin to fail him and he retreats into laughter. His perceptiveness remains, though, even sharpens; this, as far as I know, is the only Elizabethan play in which one character sees through another's disguise -- and he has to be mad to do it. He plays the recognition with enchanting tongue- clicking drollery.

This is not -- pace Roger Ebert's review in the National Post -- a matter of the actor, the director or the playwright sending themselves or their material up; there is humour throughout, but it doesn't undercut the situation, it sharpens it. There are, I think, a few unfortunate if inevitable laughs, inherent in the medium itself; Titus' specialite de la maison, seen in close-up complete with beautiful latticed pastrywork, has a more immediate impact here than it does in the theatre. But the fluidity of the screen -- its capacity to pile image on image as poetry does, in this case to complement rather than compete with it -- is brilliantly used.

And Taymor isn't sensational. The actual rape of Titus' daughter Lavinia is kept offscreen; few directors would be that disciplined. We then see her discovered by her uncle Marcus (Colm Feore) with branches apparently growing where her hands used to be. Marcus' long and, on the face of it, impossibly literary speech (why doesn't he just send for a surgeon?) has often been heavily cut, though Deborah Warner's production revealed it to be the moving heart of the play: an affirmation of pity over terror. Taymor's version doesn't have quite that impact, but it's very powerful. From her own stage production she has brought Harry Lennix as Aaron the Moor, Tamora's lover and the play's gloriously unrepentant villain. His verse has a colloquial gusto unlike anything else in the play; so does his occasional prose. "Thou hast undone our mother" screams one of her sons, when he fathers a black child on her; "villain" he replies "I have done thy mother."' His villainy is totally unrelated to his colour (though some of the white folks think differently) but his speeches concerning his child, whom he will do anything to preserve, are the first black-is-beautiful writing in English, while the sight of the baby in close-up is a wholly positive example of film's ability to adjust a balance.

No, it doesn't prove Titus to be as great as King Lear, or even as disturbing; there's nothing in it as horrific as the blinding of Gloucester, which is inflicted on a character we know and feel for and which is protracted longer than any atrocity in Titus -- partly, and with a sort of bitter compassion, because somebody tries to intervene. Titus strikes less deeply into the roots of human evil, but it presents a formidably convincing picture of the fruits. Or, as both play and film so graphically demonstrate, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.